Lion and Magic Boy

You know the Cat Lady? Everybody knows a Cat Lady. The Cat Lady is the semi-scary old lady who lives at the end of the block, yard slightly unkempt, seen once a day as she shuffles to the mailbox at the curb, wrapped tightly in a long grayish shawl-collared sweater, which upon closer inspection (if you ever got that close) would reveal constellations of moth-holes.

Children avoid the Cat Lady’s house at Halloween, as it’s the only house on the block that doesn’t have lights streaming through every window that night and crazy-toothed grinning pumpkins lining the walk up to the door, thrown open wide to welcome the flotillas of nervous and grinning or sated and entitled children who accost every house with a demanding “Trick or treat!” The Cat Lady sits alone in her house, perhaps the blue light of the television visible once in awhile through tightly-drawn, ever-closed shades.

No one thinks much about the Cat Lady, not until her grown children come a-knocking one day after not having received their monthly phone call. Or maybe it’s the smell which has begun to permeate the yard next door, which after several days makes the neighbor wonder if everything’s all right at the Cat Lady’s house.

The police are summoned, and the door is knocked down. The fetid odor of over-filled litter box nearly knocks everyone over, everyone who a minute before had been crowding in together to see what was inside. Now they shift their feet uncomfortably and try not to look each other in the eye. They all ask themselves the same question: Which one of us is going to have to go in?

The son won’t; he runs the other way during a crisis that may involve blood or hospitals. The daughter nearly fainted. Finally one of the police officers stumbles in, a cloth clutched over his face in a futile attempt to mask the smell.

Inside the house is filled with cats, a living carpet on the floor, the furniture. Faint meows emanate from distant rooms, and the smell of ammonia, coupled with the strong sweet unmistakable odor of death, permeates the house. The officer wonders idly whether they’ll ever get the smell out.

He picks his way through each room, then finally stops short and calls to his partner. he can’t look away, mesmerized as he is by the almost unrecognizable scene before him.

The woman has been dead a long time, he thinks. Days, maybe a couple of weeks. And those cats sure must have been hungry.

Yep, I’ve seen my future just now, as I moved one of the New Boys aside slightly to make room for me to sit down at the computer, clutching my dinner of instant mashed potatoes (it hardly counts that they’re organic), still in the pot.